Worlds Most Polluted Place The American Home

Article #2: World’s Most Polluted Place: The American Home!

“My, Is It Stuffy in Here!”

Most of us are keenly aware that America’s air, especially in and around large cities and industrial complexes, is seriously and dangerously polluted. Most of us are aware that even the upper atmosphere is becoming so dangerously polluted as to pose a threat to plant and animal life.

Many of us are aware that the average American home is a hotbed of pollution and stands first as a source of aerial pollution. Further, it is only beginning to dawn on researchers that pollution in the home is a source of much disease and misery for our populace.

The relation of polluted air to such respiratory diseases as pneumonia, colds, bronchitis, asthma, sinusitus, and a long list of other diseases, many nonrespiratory in nature, has been only casually noted.

However, researchers are already indicting such pollution as a contributing cause to many human ailments if, indeed, not the primary or only cause.

Certainly little aggravates an ailing person more than aerial pollutants, for they not only make suffering more severe but so hamper the body’s healing efforts as to prolong recovery.

If there is any right we must value and treasure above all others, it is the right to breathe pure air. We must not inadvertently deny ourselves the benefits of pure air by our own acts.

If you doubt that the air in your home is polluted, note the difference between it and outside air! You can tell it instantly upon passing from one to the other—even if the outside air is polluted. The air in homes has the pollution of the outside air plus that added in the home.

The primary source of polluted air in American homes is smoke, mostly from tobacco, but from sundry other sources too. Smoke has its tars, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and many other poisons.

If this is not the case in nonsmoking homes, then human aerial excreta is usually the primary source of pollution! Trapped in closed houses are the wastes of our breathing. These contain carbon dioxide, carbonic acid, and yet other waste products. They are deadly to man and beast alike in concentrations such as they become in closed homes.

There is a whole catalog of pollution sources in homes. Not only is pollution BAD in itself but it is usually found in a situation that would be bad WITHOUT the pollutants! For the air in which pollutants are found is usually “stale” air, a term for air that has been seriously deoxygenized. Air that has been breathed in, in which combustion has occurred, has been heated from whatever means,
or in which cooking has been conducted, is not only possessed of considerably less oxygen but also is possessed of considerable pollutants as a result.

Consider these sources of pollutants in the home:

Air from the outside that is polluted to start with

Tobacco smoke

Furniture polishes

Detergents

Cleansers

Aerosol cans of all descriptions

Chlorine from tap water and bleaches

Cosmetics (none are good!)

Deodorant sprays

Insect repellents

Insecticides

Powders

Air sweeteners and deodorants

Hair sprays

Lotions and “perfumes”

All drugs and “medicines”

Preservatives emanating from foods during cooking

Volatile oils

Byproducts of frying food

Ammonia

Wastes from combustion of anything burned

Human aerial excreta

Alcohols and drinks

Condiments and other irritants used in foods

Byproducts of cooking, brewing, boiling, breathing, etc.

Chemicals of all descriptions exposed to our air

Antiseptics

Perhaps the most deliberate and criminal of pollution practices is smoking. Many babies are born nicotine addicts and, if reared in an atmosphere filled with smoke of their parents, may become addicted to nicotine without ever having smoked a cigarette.

If “fouling our nests” aerially is not bad enough there are other deleterious forms of pollution in the home, notably noise pollution from inside and outside (it’s so bad as to be inescapable in most cities) and x-ray emissions from fluorescent lighting and from television.

Perhaps it is stale polluted air in homes that is largely the cause of more respiratory ailments in winter than in the summer.

In any event, we should be on guard against pollution as much as is commensurate with out circumstances. We should breathe air as fresh as possible as much as possible.